Repairing damaged automobile body panels forms a great portion of the duties of auto body technicians. Auto body technicians have historically used a variety of different techniques and tools to remove dents and otherwise repair automobile body panels. If a damaged body panel is accessible from behind, a hammer and dolly may be used to shape the panel to the correct form. Various body fillers are used to finish the repair. However, there are many occasions that accessing a panel may not be possible or feasible and other repair methods are necessary.
Time is a significant concern in repairing automobiles, since the labor cost is often a significant portion of the total repair costs. Thus, technicians and repair shops are desirous for faster and easier ways to properly repair body damage. Where access to a damaged body panel is limited, technicians have made one or more holes in the area being repaired and, with the help of a hook or a slide hammer which has been screwed into the hole, they would pull the dent out. This required that the hole had to be welded which increased the repair time and could compromise the strength of the body panel being repaired. In order to avoid drilling holes in the body panel, technicians began welding studs to the repair area. The stud itself would be held and pulled by various tools such as a slide hammer in order to pull the dented area along with the tool and repair the dent. After repairing the dent, the stud was simply cut and ground off, leaving no holes in the body panel.
While many systems have been created for pulling studs to repair dents, these are often quite expensive and cumbersome to set-up and operate. These systems often require specialized tools and studs, increasing the costs of the repair and in some cases making it more difficult to use a specialized tool in combination with a more generic tool while working on the same repair. Many of the available stud pulling systems are rather large, and thus are generally not readily available at the repair site and require transport to the site and set up time. Because of the expense of the dent pulling systems, a body shop may have a limited number of these tools and technicians may not have the tools immediately available when needed. In addition, since these systems are non-standard, they require training.
Despite the drawbacks described above, the use of the welded studs remains the general practice of the industry for pulling and repairing dents. It is, however, desirable to have tools for pulling the studs which are more easily used and which are less expensive than available dent removal systems.